Chapter 38
#38. Serotonin
After parting ways with Kim Jin-a’s party, I visited the famous gukbap stall on Server 1450.
Even though some time had passed, the stall was still packed wall to wall. I paid a festival coin and claimed a seat.
Since there was only one item on the menu anyway, a steaming bowl of gukbap was soon set in front of me.
“Your gukbap’s ready! The bowl’s hot, so be careful! It’s a ttukbaegi!”
The gukbap was served in a white bowl with an unfamiliar design. It looked different, but apparently it was basically the same kind of bowl as a ttukbaegi.
In fact, the gukbap in the bowl was boiling furiously, and when I touched it, the whole bowl was radiating heat.
The person who brought it over was bare-handed, though—probably because they had a Fire Resistance skill.
I lightly scooped some of the hot broth with my spoon and tasted it. It was seasoned with only a modest amount of salt.
Since I’d been eating nothing but White Rolls every day, even a little salt made my tongue react sharply.
There was salt and pepper on every table, but there was no need to add any more.
After tasting the broth as-is a few times, I added the side ingredients one by one.
A spoonful of chopped greens that looked a bit like green onions.
A little pepper.
A little more seasoning sauce.
Finally, I dropped in the poisoned arrow.
[Poison-Coated Steel Arrow (Poisoning: Strong)]
This was a powerful poisoned arrow obtainable on the 6th floor, and the poison on it was unusually colorless and odorless.
Because of that, even if I dissolved poison into food like this and ate it, it wouldn’t affect the taste at all.
My poison resistance stat was already so high that items like this couldn’t raise it anymore, but you never know.
After generously mixing the poison into the gukbap, I mixed in the rice and leisurely began my meal.
While savoring the taste of the gukbap in my mouth, I opened the system interface and brought up an unfamiliar window.
[Friends List]
A friends list I’d never had any reason to look at in the 2661 Tower, where I was all alone.
There were the names of the party members, including Kim Jin-a, whom I’d just parted ways with.
**
Kim Jin-a’s proposal to me was more practical than I’d expected.
“Seo Jin-hyuk, between festival coins and meteor stones, which do you need more?”
I told Kim Jin-a, who had asked that out of the blue, that I needed the coins a little more.
Meteor stones are material items used to craft event-limited equipment, and I wasn’t all that interested in gear.
If anything, it would be far more useful to bring back consumables from the lower floors that you couldn’t normally get here.
Then Kim Jin-a clapped her hands, as if she’d expected that, and said,
“Then that works out perfectly. We need meteor stones more. So how about this?”
Kim Jin-a suggested that instead of dividing the dungeon-clear rewards equally by headcount, we split them between coins and meteor stones and funnel them to the side that needs them.
“And we’d form a fixed party and do a kind of fast farming run by deliberately springing the trap like earlier and grabbing the rewards quickly.”
In addition, Kim Jin-a suggested that we just form a party and do a sort of fast coin grind.
Our party’s clear time, after triggering the trap and facing the boss right away, was less than half the existing record.
Even so, because the amount of rewards we earned was more than average, it would be more profitable to keep running this dungeon than to do some mediocre upper-tier dungeon.
The amount of currency you get from one clear is smaller than other dungeons, but if you factor in the time spent, apparently that isn’t the case.
On top of that, Kim Jin-a was confident she could re-trigger the earlier trap.
“But why me?”
But I naturally turned down the proposal. Why on earth should I form a party with them?
Even Kim Jin-a wasn’t a fool; she would obviously know that much.
“Come on, I told you, didn’t I? We’re going all-in on coins.”
It turned out that the “all-in” Kim Jin-a meant covered a much broader range than I had thought.
Kim Jin-a was going to take the meteor stones and, in exchange, hand over even the individual rewards and all the coins earned from everyone’s event quests.
Kim Jin-a’s party would safely secure meteor stones under my protection.
And I would gather a large amount of coins faster than if I went into upper-tier dungeons alone.
A trade made possible because we wanted different currencies. But for that trade to work, one premise was necessary.
Namely, the premise that I wouldn’t want meteor stones at all.
I had only said I preferred festival coins over meteor stones; I hadn’t said I didn’t need meteor stones.
But Kim Jin-a, as if she could read minds, had guessed that I didn’t need meteor stones at all.
When I asked what her basis was, Kim Jin-a spoke like a detective unraveling a case.
“When you sent Min-hyung oppa flying, I secretly searched your name on the community. I figured you’d be someone famous.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you were fighting exactly like a ranker earlier. I could tell at a glance that you had to have made a name for yourself on another server.”
So Kim Jin-a figured out my resource situation from the countless brag posts I’d put up on the community before.
She realized that I could enhance gear however I wanted with the endless materials I had.
From that, she even figured that the equipment I was wearing now only looked the way it did on the outside; all of it had to be high-enhancement gear.
And compared to the items I was wearing now, already enhanced to near the maximum, Meteor Stone gear probably wouldn’t be much help.
There were a few things that were off, but more or less, she was right.
The items I’m wearing really are high-enhancement items. I just slapped [Durability] on all of them.
The reason I didn’t want Meteor Stone gear wasn’t because of a stats upgrade problem; it was simply because I wasn’t very interested in equipment types.
Either way, it was a proposal with nothing to lose by accepting.
“Sure, why not.”
That was how I used the friend-request and trading features for the first time.
**
-Thud.
I set down the empty gukbap bowl, poured antidote potion into it, and gave it a light rinse.
If I didn’t do this, another challenger might get poisoned by whatever remained in the bowl.
“I don’t want to be branded as a street-stall terrorist.”
I left the bowl there, got up from my seat, and paid festival coins to order several more bowls for takeout.
I was planning to try the food at the other stalls too, but whatever they sold, it probably wouldn’t be as good as the gukbap here.
Anyway, I still had plenty of festival coins.
After that, I ran dungeons together with Kim Jin-a’s party several more times.
As she’d boasted, Kim Jin-a remembered the trap that summoned the boss and could trigger it again.
Having found the shortcut, our clear times kept getting faster until we could run the dungeon four times in the time it took others to clear it once.
Kim Jin-a and the other two snagged a huge amount of Meteor Stone fragments, while I picked up dozens of festival coins.
“Yes, your takeout’s ready. If you’re not going to eat it right away, should I add a few heating stones?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Yes, then please come again next time too! We’ll be open right up until the last day of the festival!”
-Ding.
As I picked up the packed gukbap, an alarm rang in the friends chatroom as if on cue.
[Kim Jin-a : Jin-hyuk, dude, today was fun thanks to you lol]
What the hell? Did the gukbap I’d just eaten have hallucinogens mixed into it? Mental contamination?
[Seo Jin-hyuk : ???]
I quickly pulled an antidote potion from my inventory and asked over chat why her speech had gotten so weird.
[Kim Jin-a : Everyone on the community talks like this]
[Kim Jin-a : Isn’t this it?]
[Seo Jin-hyuk : Yeah, that’s not it]
She must have learned it in some strange way from the things I used to talk about with the forum ghosts.
I thought something else had gone wrong, so I put the antidote potion away again.
-Ding, ding.
After Kim Jin-a’s bizarre greeting, Kim Min-hyung and Kim Jin-seok each sent a message too.
[Kim Jin-seok : Seo Jin-hyuk, thank you for your hard work today.]
[Kim Min-hyung : Please take care of us tomorrow too, hyung-nim]
After I hit him once with my shield, Kim Min-hyung had been faithfully calling me hyung-nim ever since.
At first I thought he was a rude bastard, but once the hierarchy was settled, he became very obedient.
We did have a trade involving coins, but since I was basically carrying them through the dungeon, that was only natural.
After sending brief replies to the two of them, I walked toward the inn with the takeout gukbap in hand.
Today really felt like I’d had a fun day for the first time in a long while.
The nutrition value wasn’t much, but I got to try party play, something I’d never experienced before in my life, and I even ate delicious food for once.
Kim Jin-a and the party members kept talking to me without caring at all about my shattered communication skills.
Even aside from the fact that I got a lot of coins, it still seemed like I’d been right to form a fixed party.
In truth, if all I’d wanted was to get a lot of coins, there was no need to accept Kim Jin-a’s proposal in the first place.
I could have just joined the parties of high-level challengers tackling the top-tier dungeons instead of insisting on solo play.
But if I’d done that, sure, I might have made a lot of coins, but I wouldn’t have had anything nearly this enjoyable.
Far from it, we might even have ended up in conflict because of my communication issues.
Not the exhilarating flood of dopamine that comes with getting stronger, but a gentle wave of serotonin.
Sometimes, this was nice too.
**
The next day, intending to keep grinding coins, I looked for the mini-dungeon entry map.
“Seo Jin-hyuk, over here!”
Kim Jin-a and the party members who had arrived first were waiting in front of the portal, and I joined them right away.
There was no longer any need to keep checking whether everyone was ready. I immediately put my hand on the portal to enter.
“Move it.”
At that moment, some guy standing off to the side of the portal slapped my hand away. What the hell is with this guy?
“This is our party’s spot.”
This guy’s attitude was beyond rude, but now that I think about it, did he just say this was his spot?
I wondered if he’d been preparing to enter before our party gathered, but no matter how I looked at it, that didn’t seem to be the case.
There wasn’t a single person around him who looked like a party member, and he was alone.
If he were a solo player like me, I could understand it, but hadn’t he just said he was in a party?
“What are you staring at? Get lost.”
What the hell was this guy up to?